


The Same Near As Far

by tb_ll57



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Gap Filler, M/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-11
Updated: 2014-08-11
Packaged: 2018-02-12 19:07:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2121309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tb_ll57/pseuds/tb_ll57
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>That's how he decides to go to L2. He doesn't know for sure if he'll be welcome, but he can think about finding out.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Same Near As Far

The first time Duo goes down on him, it's silent. That's what he remembers from it, the silence of it, the deep quiet he feels, the remoteness of his own feelings. Duo's lip is split and tender, his eyes are blacked still from the broken nose. His fingers, with their torn and ragged nails, are blunt inside Heero, twisting twice, again. His mouth is warm and gentle. Not manic. Not demanding. Not laughing, not now. When Heero comes, Duo wipes it away on the back of his hand, and falls asleep with his head pillowed on Heero's stomach.

He doesn't ask for a return favour. It doesn't occur to Heero to offer.

 

**

 

After Libra Heero sleeps for a month. He rents a room in a dank motel and only gets up when he has to piss. Sometimes when he wakes it's sunny and bright outside, and he remembers he's on Earth, in a town he chose because he was tired of the train and the motel was near the station. Sometimes when he wakes it's dark, and he just pulls the pillow under his head again and goes back to sleep.

But eventually he finds himself turning on the television. He skips the news-- he doesn't want to know yet. He watches a gameshow and a video-taped church service, watches a period drama with people wearing long fancy dresses and fighting with swords. He finds a vending machine in the lobby of his motel and eats microwave noodles and a chocolate-berry candy bar. He sits on his bed, but his mind is awake now. That evening, he packs his meagre carry-all, and he leaves.

Outside his hideaway he finds that life is both different and not different at all. The cities he passes through are in repair, people in the streets dragging away the rubble of mobile suit battles with field tractors and shipping trucks. He sees rebuilding. He sees fresh cemeteries, filled past their fences, new graves covered with snow. But he also sees young people smiling, and their elders back at the morning markets, and though he looks often at the skies, he never sees anything flying there but birds.

He goes back to Sanq, though he tells no-one he's come. He gets close enough to the Palace to see snipers on the rooftop, and approves. He gets close enough to Relena to watch her speak at the newly reopened University. He doesn't listen to the individual words, but lets her voice wash over him, soothe him with its strength, its high clear sweetness. Once, she looks up to his spot in the catwalk above the stage, and he thinks, somehow, that she knows he's there. But she only shades her eyes from the bright lights and goes on.

After Sanq he wanders. He has no plan, no needs, no ideas. He rides trains until he runs out of money, and then he walks. He finds an ocean, or a sea, but it doesn't matter which; it's pretty. He sits on the beach to watch the sun set over the endless waves, and then he rests there through the night, calmed by the distant roar and the wind. It surprises him that Earth is beautiful. He's never thought about it before.

He has time to think about it now. Time to think about many things. Anything at all.

That's how he decides to go to L2. He doesn't know for sure if he'll be welcome, but he can think about finding out.

 

**

 

There's a girl in Duo's flat. He sees her go in and out. She's small like Duo is, like the people on L2 are, dark-haired and bright-eyed and with that peculiar rolling walk they all have in this colony, a swagger that defies the danger all around them. L2 is not rebuilding, not like Earth. L2 is broken and the best sign of that is the crowd at the docks, fighting for seats on departing shuttles, families carrying everything they own on their backs, just like Heero.

It's two days there before he sees Duo himself. Duo comes in at the docks, too, comes in with a load of scrap. He bargains most of it away right at unloading, haggling down to the penny and still walking away with less than should be owed, maybe because the woman is old and arthritic, the young woman has a baby in the sling on her chest, the man who wants the metal walks with a cane and has a bad scar over his eye, as if he's been deliberately blinded. L2 wears its wounds openly. Communally.

He follows Duo from the docks to a pub. The pub is dark and smells like cigarette smoke and weak beer, but Duo goes to the bar and orders whiskey. The bartender must know him, because he puts a glass on the bar and the bottle beside it, and leaves Duo with it.

Then Duo turns and says, 'You might as well come here.'

So he'd known Heero was following. That's good. Heero had started to worry. He joins Duo at the bar, takes one of the stools. Duo refills the glass, pushes it at Heero. Heero sips it down.

'You look better,' Duo murmurs. 'You were getting kind of pale at the end there.'

'So were you.' Heero returns the glass. Duo fills it again. He drinks it all in one swallow. 'How long have you been here?'

'About six weeks.' Duo drinks another glass before passing it to Heero. 'They're closing down some of the satellites. L3 is refusing to take refugees. L4 is still letting them in, but it won't be for long. Everyone who's left will need-- everything they can get.' He meets Heero's eyes. 'There's going to be another war. Or more of the one we just finished. You can smell it.'

'No. People are moving on. Picking up the pieces.'

' _People_ ,' Duo says. He reaches over the bar and gets another glass for himself. He fills it, splashing brown liquid in, catching a drop on his fingertip. He licks it away. 'No-one asks the _people_ what they want. Don't want. I don't remember asking the people before I dropped a Gundam on Earth.'

Heero covers Duo's hand on the bar. Duo's hands are strong, almost as strong as Heero's, and just a little bigger. When he turns his palm up into Heero's hold, his fingers overlap Heero's by almost a full knuckle.

They lock the men's room door and Duo pushes him against it. The noise of the radio at the bar fades immediately to a thrum of bass beats, lost in the tattoo of Duo's breath against his collar, his belly.

'You don't have to,' Heero says, as Duo slides against him, hard already. Heero is hard already. Duo cups him with that big hand. Duo shivers when Heero touches him. His eyes close, and Heero gazes down at him, wondering.

 

**

 

The girl brings him a blanket for the couch. The barred window over the couch lets in all the noise of the street below, and L2 is lively at night. Heero likes it. The people of L2 shout and argue and laugh the way they walk, brash and daring. He lays awake to listen.

 

**

 

'Bought the ship for shit,' the girl says.

'And got what we paid for,' Duo adds.

Heero agrees. It's battered, their ship, and that's the parts of it that aren't obviously cadged from the very scrap it's meant to gather. 'Radiation?' he asks.

'Within limits,' Duo shrugs.

'Barely,' says the girl.

There's a rash on Duo's knuckles, on his feet, on his cheeks. The girl too. Heero looks at it with more concern, now.

Duo helps the girl with her helmet, and Heero helps Duo with his. 'You'll be okay just knocking around until we get back?' Duo asks him, tinny through the speaker, already hissing with the release of oxygen. 'You can leave if you want to. I'm already shocked you've stayed this long.'

Three days. Duo's opinion of him is low. But it's really the longest they've ever been together.

'No,' Heero says, to all of it, unsure of that much. The girl snorts derisively. Duo's eyes slide to her, for a moment, then back to him.

'I never asked what you did with your Gundam,' Duo says then, abrupt in his tone, with an odd hard note, distorted by the helmet.

Heero looks at him. 'If we don't need it again,' he answers, 'then it doesn't matter what I did with it.'

'I don't rely on “if”.' Duo secures the zipline to his belt and climbs the footholds. When he's halfway up the ship's pockmarked hide, he stops, hanging loose-limbed and relaxed from the line. His head turns down, but the light is bad, and Heero can't see past the plastic over his face.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. Duo doesn't say anything else before he climbs the rest of the way. He doesn't wave before he shuts the hatch. Heero stays to watch the launch, but it's just one more ship leaving the dock, anonymous in the fleeing masses.

 

**

 

The scrap itself is interesting. He expects titanium, after the immensity of the Battle of Libra, the legions of mobile dolls and Leos. But the age of what's being brought in is surprising. Why scrap the old space junk first? Some of it is decades old. Some of it might be even older.

'Government.' Duo shows him the flyer. 'Flexing their muscles. They want the processors. So they take the suits. We get what's left over.'

'Familiar, at least,' the girl mutters.

They eat well, better than he would eat if it were him alone. The girl cooks and cleans, but only because Duo can't do either very well. When she scolds him, he smiles. He doesn't smile when he looks at Heero. But when the lights go low and they retire for the night, Duo comes to him.

The first time they fuck it's nearly three in the morning. Duo's hand lays over his chest, stroking slowly, sleepily. Then it dips low. Duo kisses his bare stomach, his tongue damp and hot against Heero's navel as he catches the button in Heero's boxers. But when he slides down the couch, Heero stops him.

'Not your mouth,' he whispers. He waits for it, the barest nod of Duo's head.

It's harder than he thinks. They're neither of them practised at it, and it hurts, until Duo pulls away and walks off into the dark. But he's only gone a moment, and he returns with a bottle. He slicks Heero's hand with a thin oil, and that solves the problem. The rest they figure out, slowly, fumbling sometimes, and then suddenly completion comes. Heero pants his orgasm into Duo's shoulder, and has to unclench his fist from Duo's thigh. He leaves bruises there that are smudges of purple contusion by light.

'Do you want?' he rasps.

They're pressed so close he feels Duo swallow. 'No. It's okay.'

'Duo.' He separates gingerly, tender now. Duo makes room for him to settle. His body is cooling, his sweat cold on his neck and hair. But Duo is still hard when Heero reaches for him.

'You don't have to.'

'You don't want me to?'

'You're not that kind of guy.'

No. But perhaps he ought to be. As Duo has always done for him, without question. He thinks of that, new thoughts that need new space in his head. 'Let me watch you, then.'

Duo's eyes fly up to his. Heero thinks of him from that first time, after that OZ prison, just after Heero had chosen not to kill him and instead to save him. The first of many revelations, that lives could be spared, and that it could be right. How in the hospital Duo had beckoned him to the cot, and Heero had laid himself flat on it, and Duo had touched him.

Duo's body is a mystery, in the dark, planes of shadow. Duo cocks his knee wide, to rest it against Heero's, and he smooths his hand flat over his belly before gripping himself, low first to the soft ballsac, then up to the tip. Heero knows what those hands can do, capable fingers. It takes exactly fifteen strokes. Duo wipes the sticky mess on his boxers, to spare the couch. He clears his throat, as if uncomfortable. But then suddenly he's chuckling.

'I don't know why that was so weird,' he says.

'Was it?'

'Incredibly.' Duo rolls, and squirms to fit against him. He warms Heero where their skin presses. 'Hilde's going to flip her shit if we're naked when she comes out for breakfast,' he says, and drops off to sleep without doing anything about it.

 

**

 

There are rumours everywhere. That the mobile suits being scrapped from Libra's spacefield are not being scrapped at all-- only collected. That it's not the government collected them, but someone more sinister. Or perhaps just someone more powerful. Or, perhaps, someone who plans to be.

Heero takes his turn at scrapping in the ship. The laser broom of Duo's ship is more blunt force than fine calibration, and he lacks Duo's skill in creating precise trajectories for the space junk he propels with the laser. He's better at hauling in the interceptor without losing the magnetic draw, and they net more when they work in tandem. It takes four trips for him to develop the tell-tale rash on his hands and feet, inadequately protected by the thin synthetic of their suits. When Duo sees it, Duo makes him sit out the next few trips, until the rash fades on its own.

He realises, then, that Duo cares for him. He's never been cared for before, in that kind of way. As if he's something to be spared. Protected.

Or saved for something to come. Duo believes something bad is brewing in Space. When he watches the news, at night, he's also watching Heero.

 

**

 

They make it four months like that. In all his life Heero has never spent four months in one place. But the day comes when he wakes up with an itch inside him, a decision made that didn't require conscious deliberation. He's ready to leave. Whatever needed doing, whatever change in him that's been growing, it's done.

He stirs oats on the stove, adds a knob of margarine and a pinch of ground pepper, and turns to find Duo's eyes already on him. When he sets a bowl in front of Duo, Duo looks away.

It's the girl who speaks. She says, 'I can make you some sandwiches for the road. If you want.'

'Thank you.' It's a kindness; she doesn't like him, and he knows it. Knows why she doesn't. She might just be relieved he's going.

'So that's it, then.' Duo picks up his spoon. He rubs his thumb over the bent handle. He scoops oats into his mouth and chews, and says nothing else.

He has nothing more to pack now than when he left Earth four months ago. It takes no more time than before. But leaving is not so easy. Duo eats and rinses his bowl. He hooks his jacket down from its peg, and zips it tight, shoves his fists deep into its pockets.

He says, 'You know where to find me. When it's time.'

'Maybe nothing will happen,' Heero replies.

'Maybe pigs will pilot Gundams,' the girl mumbles.

'So long as someone does,' Duo says shortly. 'Don't go out there blind, Heero.'

'Hope isn't blind.'

Duo softens. Just a tiny bit. But then he looks away, drawn and stony-faced. 'Hope just doesn't know it's blind,' he says. 'See you when I see you.'

 

**

 

Space is changing. He's never known anything but minefields and checkpoints, fortresses and lockdowns. People travel freely, now. Colonials mix in public, accents blending, money changing hands without review from scowling soldiers. But sometimes he sees faces in the crowds that do not belong there. Eyes that stare too long and too keenly, groups of men who sit in dark corners and talk too softly to be overheard. It might be nothing at all but suspicions that are slow to fade, grudges that have no vengeance left. It might be nothing that will not fade with time.

Maybe. The Sphere is full of maybes, now. Heero is a maybe. What he might do, he doesn't know yet. What he might have to will be whether he's ready or not.

Whenever he thinks of Duo, waiting on L2 for a maybe, he thinks-- together, he knows what they would be. No maybes in that, except for whether it would be enough to stay for. Someday.


End file.
